Reader reviews for Dead Synchronicity: Tomorrow Comes Today

Realisation is great, the game is well put. But there’s some big let downs.

Some puzzle are very badly clued, you’ll do some things only because you can and are just trying things out of the blue, not knowing why.
And 2 puzzles can leave you running around for a long time for bad reasons:
“Bring me this I’ll give you that” clearly means what it means but no, you have to guess you need to bring something else, which you’ll eventually guess by trying everything on everything out of desperation, or rightly resorting to a walkthrough.
“No need to talk to that person again” Means no more interaction needed to any gamer. But no, you have to give that person something later, out of a single sentence heard hours ago… It will teach you how to love walkthroughs.

Turns out bringing concentration camps in the story is just for the sake of it. The ultimate drama receipe easy and ready to reuse. Shame to use it like that and not to deeper means.

Any SF fan will loosely guess what the story is about. But what could have been a great mechanic, the visions, are really only used once and otherwise, other than ambiance and visuals, serve no purpose. Apart from making you guess something about the main character early in the game that is revealed at the end with then no surprise.

Worst of all, after explaining the whereabouts of the story to you like you were a retard, the game ends on a cliffhanger, while just a final puzzle sequence could have completed it. The developpers anounced they would be funded for a follow-up, but they didn’t do it, so it remains unfinished. Anyway they would have had a bad time coming up with enough material for an entire new game out of this. Real bad commercial choice.

In the end it’s just a missed opportunity for a great game. I lost my time. No pun, unfortunately.

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Time Played: 5-10 hours
Difficulty: Hard

Lets start with the best and most important first:

It is an absolutely brilliant story that had me totally immersed for the duration of the game. It is a dark end of the world story with plenty of gore and cruel things happening, while at the same time the whole story is an enigma wrapped in a mystery, leaving you clueless as to what is actually going on for quite a long time. I can recommend it to anyone interested in this kind of dark mature story, simply for the story alone.

It also has an unique art style that suit the game very well and enhances the whole dark gritty setting. It has regular flashbacks and perhaps more important flashforwards, that also add a lot to the whole atmosphere of the game. 

It is unfortunately not all positive and there is also a few things that I didn’t really like, first and foremost:
The writing is about as subtle as a sledgehammer to the forehead!

Everything and I do mean absolutely everything has to be verbalised, and to make sure that we understand everything, then everything is repeated at least three times. On top of that the game is also filled with lengthy expositions, and for some godforsaken reason everybody feels the need to tell me their life story about 1/10 of a second after I meet them for the first time.

I am also not a big fan of the protagonist Michael. I quite honestly found him to be a bit of a whiner, and to make it worse, he also regularly does things that can only be described as outright stupidity. Where I however lost much of my remaining sympathy for him, was when he does something that is just outright cowardly imo.

The puzzles are as such not bad, they have a decent difficult and there are plenty of them, but they are all with one single exception, of the standard inventory type, which is a real shame as the whole setting could easily lend itself to some more interesting puzzles. There is as I see it a lot of wasted opportunity here.

The games does end on a bit of a cliffhanger but I don’t really mind that. Even if a sequel is never made, which I really hope it will be, then it just means that we have an open ended game that we can interpret whichever way we like, which is something there otherwise isn’t much of in this game.

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Time Played: 5-10 hours
Difficulty: Just Right

This is the first game I helped crowdfund that reach publication, and I am very pleased with the result of my little investment. Gorgeous hand-drawn backgrounds, a chilling dark plot, believable sinister characters and some convincing voice acting combine to a truly immersive experience. Animation is perhaps a bit too choppy, but it fits the art much better than rendered objects would have. In fact, the great looking character artwork is probably what contributes most to giving the game a genuinely unique style. A highly impressive presentation, especially considering how small the team is. I am now eagerly awaiting a sequel, along with other titles from Fictiorama Studios.

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Time Played: 5-10 hours
Difficulty: Just Right